The Manchu alphabet is the alphabet used to write the now nearly-extinct Manchu language. A similar script is used today by the Xibe people, who speak a language considered either as a dialect of Manchu or a closely related, mutually intelligible language. It is written vertically from top to bottom, with columns proceeding from left to right.
History
''Tongki fuka akū hergen''
According to the , in 1599 the Jurchen leader Nurhaci decided to convert the Mongolian alphabet to make it suitable for the Manchu people. He decried the fact that while illiterate Han Chinese and Mongolians could understand their respective languages when read aloud, that was not the case for the Manchus, whose documents were recorded by Mongolian scribes. Overriding the objections of two advisors named Erdeni and G'ag'ai, he is credited with adapting the Mongolian script to Manchu. The resulting script was known as tongki fuka akū hergen — the "script without dots and circles".
''Tongki fuka sindaha hergen''
In 1632, Dahai added diacritical marks to clear up a lot of the ambiguity present in the original Mongolian script; for instance, a leading k, g, and h are distinguished by the placement of no diacritical mark, a dot, and a circle, respectively. This revision created the standard script, known as tongki fuka sindaha hergen — the "script with dots and circles". As a result, the Manchu alphabet contains little ambiguity. Recently discovered manuscripts from the 1620s make clear, however, that the addition of dots and circles to Manchu script began before their supposed introduction by Dahai. Dahai also added the tulergi hergen : ten graphemes to facilitate Manchu to be used to write Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan loanwords. Previously, these non-Manchu sounds did not have corresponding letters in Manchu. Sounds that were transliterated included the aspirated sounds k', k, x ; ts' ; ts ; sy ; dz ; c'y ; j'y ; and ž.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were three styles of writing Manchu in use: standard script, semi-cursive script, and cursive script. Semicursive script had less spacing between the letters, and cursive script had rounded tails. The Manchu alphabet was also used to write Chinese. A modern example is in Manchu: a Textbook for Reading Documents, which has a comparative table of romanizations of Chinese syllables written in Manchu letters, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn and Wade–Giles. Using the Manchu script to transliterate Chinese words is a source of loanwords for the Xibe language. Several Chinese-Manchu dictionaries contain Chinese characters transliterated with Manchu script. The Manchu versions of the Thousand Character Classic and Dream of the Red Chamber are actually the Manchu transcription of all the Chinese characters. In the Imperial Liao-Jin-Yuan Three HistoriesNational Language Explanation commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor, the Manchu alphabet is used to write Evenki words. In the Pentaglot Dictionary, also commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor, the Manchu alphabet is used to transcribe Tibetan and Chagatai words.
Method of teaching
Despite the alphabetic nature of its script, Manchu was traditionally taught as a syllabary. Like the Mongols, Manchu children were taught to memorize all the syllables in the Manchu language separately as they learned to write, dividing the syllables into twelve different classes, based on the final phonemes of the syllables, all of which ended in vowels. When learning the language, Manchus were taught to say right away "la, lo", etc., instead of saying "l, a — la"; "l, o — lo"; etc. As a result, the syllables contained in their syllabary do not contain all possible combinations that can be formed with their letters. They made, for instance, no such use of the consonants l, m, n and r as English; hence if the Manchu letters s, m, a, r and t were joined in that order, a Manchu would not pronounce them as "smart". Today, the opinion on whether it is alphabet or syllabic in nature is still split between different experts. In China, it is considered syllabic, and Manchu is still taught in this manner, while in the West it is treated like an alphabet. The alphabetic approach is used mainly by foreigners who want to learn the language, as studying the Manchu script as a syllabary takes longer.
Alphabet
Punctuation
The Manchu alphabet has two kinds of punctuation: two dots, analogous to a period; and one dot, analogous to a comma. However, with the exception of lists of nouns being reliably punctuated by single dots, punctuation in Manchu is inconsistent, and therefore not of much use as an aid to readability. The equivalent of the question mark in Manchu script consists of some specialparticles, written at the end of the question.
The Jurchens of a millennium ago became the ancestors of the Manchus when Nurhaci united the Jianzhou Jurchens and his son subsequently renamed the consolidated tribes as the "Manchu". Throughout this period, the Jurchen language evolved into what we know as the Manchu language. Its script has no relation to the Manchu alphabet, however. The Jurchen script was instead derived from the Khitan script, itself derived from Chinese characters.
Unicode
The Manchu alphabet is included in the Unicode block for Mongolian.
